Greenwich Village, New York City. www.http://millefiorifavoriti.blogspot.com

In case you hadn't yet noticed, urban living is pretty hot right now. Preference surveys show time and time again that a strong share of the overall American public would prefer to live in a walkable urban neighborhood than a suburban subdivision which caters only to the automobile. A majority still prefers suburban living, but the minority which craves city living is large and getting larger.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The idea of being fined for crossing the road at the wrong place can bemuse foreign visitors to the US, where the origins of so-called jaywalking lie in a propaganda campaign by the motor industry in the 1920s.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

This post is all about why traffic congestion is a good thing for your city. If you’re looking for advice on how to get rid of the traffic jams that take place every day on your city’s highways, you’re in the wrong place. Here goes… Read more: The Truth About Traffic Congestion - urbanSCALE.com

In the view of most urbanists, walkability is a measure of how healthy a city is. It essentially describes how safe and how well-planned a city is for pedestrians, which will in turn determine how often citizens interact with their city. There are so many factors that go in to making a city walkable. The factor that I find to be the most important, in pretty much all cases, is how safe the walkways are in terms of traffic. Traffic calming methods become incredibly important when improving an urban space. Read more: Zen & The Art of Traffic Calming | PlaceMakers

In the early 1970s, Ron Basford, a Canadian Cabinet minister and loyal Vancouverite, seized on the idea of converting Granville Island—a modestly sized pancake barely a half mile (0.8 km) south of the emerging downtown—into a special place. Until the mid—20th century, the island had prospered as an industrial hotbed, jammed with shipyards, metal fabricators, wire rope manufacturers, and warehouses. But with the shift in the post–World War II economy away from industrial production, tenants departed, leaving the island derelict and the remaining structures vulnerable to arson. Read more: Keeping an Urban Authenticity Alive: Vancouver's Granville Island - Urban Land Magazine

Monday, February 10, 2014

Among the first 10 books I was assigned to read at the start of my career in architecture this one still stands as the odd ball. Fifty three years after its publication I return to its pages to highlight and debate its most important points. I have found recently that although Death and Life is much talked about, its principal thesis and ground-breaking assertions are not read much less understood. The book opens with crushing salvo and an enormous boast: Read more: A Great Work at 53 | lewisnvillegas

In planning retail and mixed use environments, it is important that we accommodate for all modes of travel. Studies have shown that there is a tendency among retailers to overestimate the volume of customers arriving by vehicle, and underestimate the numbers arriving by other modes. Combined with the significant infrastructure costs required to accommodate cars, this perception has historically led to strategically poor investments in road improvements and municipally subsidized parking garages. Read more: Pedestrians or Drivers: Who is More Important? | Reurbanist

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

It's hard to imagine how the wintry mess blanketing cities across midwest and northeast could improve street safety. But recent snows provide one benefit being touted by safety advocates: temporary curb extensions or "neckdowns" caused by snow banks. Having trouble convincing local officials or neighbors that curb extensions or "neckdowns" can improve pedestrian safety without taking necessary space away from vehicles? Maybe all you need is a good snowstorm, so that "nature's tracing paper" can create a temporary, but educational, snowy neckdown–or "sneckdown". Read more: Sneckdowns: Nature's Street Safety Pilot Project | Planetizen: The Urban Planning, Design, and Development Network

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

The tech world has been abuzz about the developments of the self-driving car, visions that are supplanting the earlier visions that would have filled the sky with flying cars. But beyond the hype and the promise, how will autonomous vehicles--and their accompanying technologies--really enter our lives? Read more: The Car As You Know It Is Dead | Co.Design | business + design

Despite global publicity for its bold plans to build the “greenest” development anywhere in the world and the rapid pace of construction early on, Dockside Green lost its momentum shortly after the economic collapse of 2008 and unlike other projects in the region, never recovered. More at: Dockside Green mega-project goes back to the drawing board

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Four faculty members and students from A&AA have collaborated on a book about transforming streets that were originally designed more to accommodate motor vehicles rather than pedestrians and bicyclists. Rethinking Streets: An Evidence-Based Guide to 25 Complete Street Transformations, documents twenty-five case studies from around the country that helped facilitate more walking, biking, and transit use while enhancing commercial activity, with minimal to no negative impact on automobile access. The book was released December 2013. More at: Book simplifies street redesigns | Planning, Public Policy and Management

Triumph of the City — How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier / Edward Glaeser

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong / Alan Broadbent

Urban Planning For Dummies / Jordan Yin

Walkable City — How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time / Jeff Speck

Walking Home — The Life and Lessons of a City Builder / Ken Greenberg

Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — Oil and the End of Globalization / Jeff Rubin

Wrestling with Moses : How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City / Anthony Flint

[The motorcar] exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highway till the open road seemed to become non-stop cities... Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run.

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[An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs]

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)…

The heart-of-the-day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks.

Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, shuts up his shop for a while and goes to exchange the time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters the luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts a compliment on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless something calls them together, like the bagpipe. Who the piper was and why he favored our street I have no idea. The bagpipe just skirled out in the February night, and as if it were a signal the random, dwindled movements of the sidewalk took on direction.

When he finished and vanished, the dancers and watchers applauded, and applause came from the galleries, too, half a dozen of the hundred windows on Hudson Street. Then the windows closed, and the little crowd dissolved into the random movements of the night street.

I have made the daily ballet of Hudson Street sound more frenetic than it is, because writing telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way. In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses.